W. B. Yeats, b. Dublin, June 13, 1865, d. Jan. 28, 1939, was perhaps the greatest English-language poet of the 20th century. The major defining elements of Yeats's poetic career were visible by his 24th year. He had formed a profound attachment to the county of Sligo, where he stayed for long periods while living in London (1867-83); his interest in the occult led him to found (1885) the Dublin Hermetic Society and to join (1887) the London Lodge of Theosophists; his 1885 meeting with the nationalist John O'Leary prompted his discovery of Ireland as a literary subject and his commitment to the cause of Irish national identity; in 1889 he fell in love with Maud Gonne and published The Wanderings of Oisin. Yeats's lifework was an attempt to "hammer into unity" these evolving areas of his experience.

Between 1889 and 1902, Yeats sustained these original commitments. Irish myth and landscapes fill the poems of The Rose (1893). His edition of Blake (1893; with Edwin Ellis) influenced his own thought. He enshrined his unrequited love for Maud Gonne in the stylized, erotic, symbolic verses of The Wind among the Reeds (1899). A meeting (1896) with Lady Isabella Augusta Gregory and visits to Coole Park provided a model of social grace and generosity that was practically useful and, in his poetry, of symbolic importance. Head of the Order of the Golden Dawn (London, 1900), he became (1902) President of the Irish National Theatre Society (later the Abbey Theatre) for which he had written, among other plays, the patriotic Cathleen in Houlihan (1902). Motivating such activities was Yeats's desire to raise national consciousness by cultural means and to extend his own awareness of himself as a poet, as a shaper not only of verses but of the world.

Two events confirmed Yeats's dual role as poet and public man. In 1922, at the end of the Anglo-Irish war (1916-22), he became a senator of the Irish Free State. In 1923 he received the Nobel Prize for literature.

This willed coincidence between his life and work guarantees Yeats's stature as the greatest modern poet in the English language. His life is a spectacular series of revisions and "re-makings" of the self; its accidents he repeatedly translated into the permanencies of art, his own history into myth. At 19 years of age, "he lived, breathed, ate, drank and slept poetry." In his last letter he wrote, "Man can embody truth but he cannot know it... You can refute Hegel, but not the Saint or the Song of Sixpence." Sanctity and poetry were the embodiments of truth. Yeats successfully staked his life on the second: his poetry embodies the truth of his life. As if to carry this truth beyond the grave, the words on his tombstone are the last words in his Collected Poems:

"Cast a cold eye
On life, on death.
Horseman, pass by!"